Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.
Don't be a time manager, be a priority manager.
The question is: How are you able to organize your information, your tasks, and get stuff done spanning those different roles? Nobody lives in isolation.
Honest to God, for me, I've never been a guy to stack projects. A lot of these other guys, they like to do this and then line up what they're doing next and line up what they're doing next. I just can't do it.
I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
Once you have a clear picture of your priorities - that is values, goals, and high leverage activities - organize around them.
The best way to handle responsibility is to break it down into smaller parts. Take care of one small thing at a time.
Time management is a misnomer, the challenge is to manage ourselves.
Do not put off today's work until tomorrow, lest work accumulate and you achieve nothing.
Any time we have projects that we haven't begun or completed, they drain energy.
I think that since I've had the baby, who's almost two, it's a work-hard-play-hard. Imake a lot of lists, I'm very scheduled, which is hard sometimes, but it keeps me organized - I know Now I can play or Now I've got to work.
I am big on writing to-do lists and having new goals to reach all the time, as it keeps me motivated and inspired.
When priorities are in place, one can more patiently tolerate unfinished business.
Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power.
There's a lot to do. There's a lot to do. More than I even thought.
Organizing ahead of time makes the work more enjoyable.
I keep a notebook of the things I need to get done in a day, week, month along with my overarching goals. Whenever I have a couple moments on set or on a plane, I work on ticking off my to-do list.
The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after.
I love getting things done. That's why I spend several hours a day reading productivity articles. And when the day is done, I bookmark the ones I didn't get to for later. I learned that trick in a productivity article.
If you're making a bunch of little decisions - like, do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the spam folder? - that's a handful of decisions right there, and you haven't done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue.
You're actually making the rest of your day productive by spending 30 minutes reviewing your to-do's, prioritizing them, and ruthlessly removing things that shouldn't be there.
If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? ... Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven't really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].
I love to-do lists.
People who know me well have learned to insist that I commit to obligations by opening my laptop and putting them onto the appropriate calendar or list - a verbal agreement and a promise to remember won't work.
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
